Friday, August 28, 2009

But even between the story in the paper and the post yesterday, I still had plenty of good quotes left over, so I figured they were worth posting here. So, here ya go...

Chase Vasser on Rennie's leadership..."He's very intense, but when I make mistakes, I try not to get down on myself because I want to be perfect, but he's the first person to come to me and tell me to relax. He's a true leader."

Nick Williams on what Rennie brings to the defense..."Truthfully, every play before the play, you think, oh man, I've got to be on my Ps and Qs. I have to be on top of my game. You have a guy like Rennie, and every play he's going hard. He's running hard, you know he's going to be in the right spot at the right time. When I'm out on the field, I'm just like, I'm going to match Rennie. I'm going to run to the ball, do the little things, work on my technique. It's amazing to see his field presence. I can just play fast because he'll call out everybody. He'll tell them all the calls so I can just play fast."

Williams on whether it's worse to be corrected by Rennie or Coach Jancek..."I think I'd say Rennie because he'll tell me, 'Man, you've got to get that right.' Coach is going to coach you regardless, whether you're doing right or doing bad. You might think you had the perfect play, but the coach is going to tell you you need to fix this or fix that. But Rennie, But it's rewarding though."

Rennie Curran on what it's like to be a star now..."When I go back to high school, little kids ask me for my autograph. It's kind of a surreal feeling to go back and experience that when you've always been that young kid. Even when I walk through the mall and see my jerseys hanging up, it's like, wow, I really have come a long way. I have a good family, and it hasn't changed me. I'm still the same guy. I still keep the same people around and everything. It's a good feeling to just come up here and work hard and just see the fruits."

Curran on being snubbed by many preseason All-SEC lists..."It definitely gives you a little bit of motivation to know that people might not respect you as much as you think they should, but at the end of the day, you're just trying to win those games. If the offense is doing well, the defense is doing well and we're winning games, that respect is going to come. The lists that they're making because their teams made it far. They made it to the SEC championship, to the national championship. We can't expect to get respected when my defense isn't producing and people are getting 40 points on us. That's how it works."

Curran on how he feels about the Bulldogs' successful offseason..."It's a real proud feeling to know where we came from last year and how much that affected our season and how we all responded. The leadership helped people realize why we came here – and that was to go to school, play football and hopefully make a living for yourself one day. We just realized that and refocused and come in day in and day out and handle whatever task we were faced with."Curran on the morale of this year's team vs. last year..."It's been night and day with the morale of the team, the attitude of the guys. Whether it's running 10 hundreds or whatever, everybody's just focusing on doing whatever it takes. It's great to have all the guys buy in and know that when they come to Butts-Mehre, it's time to work, that they separate the work from the play."

Curran on his goals for this season..."Really my goal is just to pretty much be as perfect as I can on the field and continue to improve on the field. I don't really care about how many tackles I have or anything, but if I'm doing the right thing to help the team, that's the main thing. I don't want to be the guy to mess up that causes a loss. That's everything to me is just to be a productive player so I can say I helped contribute. It really wouldn't matter if I was first team or scout team, as long as I know I contributed to this team and I got better every single day."

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About the Author

Seth Emerson has been covering the SEC and Georgia (on and off) since 2002. He worked at the Albany Herald from 2002-05, then spent five years at The State in Columbia, S.C., covering South Carolina. He returned to Athens in August of 2010, only to find that David Pollack and David Greene were no longer playing for the Bulldogs. Adjustments were made.

Emerson is originally from Silver Spring, Md., and graduated from Maryland in 1998 with a degree in journalism and a minor in getting lost on the way to practically everywhere. Then he spent four years at The Washington Post, covering small colleges, a couple NCAA basketball tournaments, and on one glorious day, was yelled at by Tony Kornheiser. It was probably at The Post that he also learned to write in the third person.

These days he lives in Athens with his beloved and somewhat wimpy dog, Archie. Together they fight crime at night in northeast Georgia, except on nights there is no crime, in which case they sit at home, sip on white wine and watch reruns of "Mad Men."